Anmer Hall will give the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge a much-cherished
normality while the Duke joins the air ambulance service

The Union flag bunting flapped against the stone facade of the craft shop in Swaffham’s market square yesterday. It is a weather-beaten gesture of permanent patriotism, though, not a rapid response to this week’s headlines. The Dukeand Duchess of Cambridge are preparing to spend much more time at their country residence close to this Norfolk town, but round here members of the Royal family are nearly as common as turnip fields.

“It makes no odds to me whether I see them or not,” says Kevin Pitt, who runs the tackle shop, about a half-hour drive from their new place, Anmer Hall. “Sandringham has always been just up the road. Just the other day, my son-in-law was in the garage at the same time as Prince Harry. People don’t take so much notice of them up here.”

This is precisely the reaction that the couple crave. They cherish any remaining vestiges of normality, and are happiest not in a palace or grand apartment but in a cosy home such as the farmhouse in Anglesey that they rented for two years after their wedding, while the Duke worked as a search-and-rescue pilot for the Royal Air Force.

After leaving the military last September, however, the Duke announced a “transitional year”. Seasoned royal watchers assumed this was palace jargon for a brief intermission before succumbing to an endless schedule of official engagements.

In January, Buckingham Palace courtiers were quoted privately conceding that the Queen, 88, and the Duke of Edinburgh, 93, were on a “gradual downward trajectory” in the number of engagements they can carry out. The Duke, it was thought, would pick up some of the slack after going on a tour of Australia with his wife and taking a short agricultural course at Cambridge University.

The Duke, it is clear now, had other ideas. On Thursday, he announced a new job as a pilot for the East Anglian Air Ambulance. In a major departure from royal precedent, the role makes him the first future king to work in a civilian job. He has signed up for two years and will work four days a week, with four days off in between shifts, leaving much less time for his official duties.

How, then, will the Duke and Duchess adjust to their new lives?

Apartment 1A in Kensington Palace will remain their permanent residence but, once the Duke has obtained his civilian pilot’s licence they will, from spring 2015, be spending most of their time at the 10-bedroom Anmer Hall on the Sandringham Estate. The hall, which has a swimming pool and a tennis court, has undergone a £1.5 million refurbishment to prepare it for the couple and their one-year-old son.

The hall is a short commute from Cambridge and Norwich airports, where the air ambulance service is based, and its location has another advantage. It places the Duke and Duchess at the centre of a developing set of friends, dubbed the Turnip Toffs, who are moving back to run family estates in the county.

“A lot of their age group are returning to Norfolk,” says Sir Jeremy Bagge, a former high sheriff of Norfolk whose ancestors first encouraged a former Prince of Wales to buy Sandringham, and who remains close to the Royal family. “Most of them are married and some of them have young children, so it will be a very happy atmosphere. They have got friends in Norfolk already and they will be introduced to others. It is all very relaxed.”

Sir Jeremy, whose family arrived in Norfolk “with the Vikings” and own Stradsett Hall near Downham Market, says the families swim and play tennis at each other’s houses, and shoot together. “It won’t take long before Prince George is given his first gun,” he says. “There are an awful lot of private estates and they have their little walkabout shoots for the young – nothing smart.”

The royal couple, he says, will relish the locals’ respect for privacy. “People are not pushy in Norfolk,” he explains. “They never have been. In the main, these are old, old families.”

One such family is the van Cutsems. Hugh van Cutsem was one of the Prince of Wales’s closest friends at university. He used to rent Anmer Hall, so the Duke is already familiar from visits to play with van Cutsem’s four children. He later moved to his own 4,000-acre estate near Swaffham, but the families remained close and his son, William, was chosen as one of Prince George’s godparents last year.

Hugh van Cutsem died last September, aged 72, but, Sir Jeremy explains, William has now moved back to Norfolk, as has Davina Duckworth-Chad, the daughter of another of the Prince of Wales’s friends.

Other members of the circle who live close by include the Duke’s cousin (on his mother’s side) Laura Fellowes, with her husband Nick Pettman, and Viscount Thomas Coke, who owns Holkham Hall, a Palladian pile near the coast.

Yet the Duke is unlikely to have much time for socialising. As Flight Lieutenant Wales, he was used to challenging sea rescues in Sea King helicopters. Now, he will work nine-and-a-half hour shifts piloting an air ambulance, picking up heart-attack victims in busy town centres and attending traffic accidents, as well as ferrying folk from isolated rural areas to hospital.

“I can recall a day not so long ago when we flew 18 flights in 10 hours,” says Jeff James, who has been an air ambulance pilot in Leicestershire and Derbyshire for 16 years. “You might get enough time to put fuel in the aircraft, then the phone rings and you are out on the next job straight away.”

None of his team hold down second jobs. “There is little capacity for doing anything else – and, to be honest, after doing a five-day stint, you need a couple of days off.”

Yet the Duke will have to fit some public engagements around his flying schedule and a Kensington Palace spokesman says his roster will “take into account” his official duties. Penny Junor, the royal biographer, believes the Duke will consider a little tiredness a reasonable price for a better lifestyle.

“I think he was going stir-crazy at Kensington Palace,” she says. “He was trapped there, not having the freedom he had in Anglesey and at university in St Andrews. He has got a lifetime of royal duties and charity work ahead of him. This allows him to do something slightly more stimulating that tests his skills. They can live a normal life, more or less.”

And yet the Duke will never simply be a pilot. According to Jeff James, pilots are regularly asked to pose for “selfies” with passers-by after attending emergencies, and it is a guarantee that the Duke will attract even more attention.

“If you land on a village green on a Sunday afternoon, the village will turn out to come and see what has happened,” he says, adding that a pilot would not remain in the helicopter but get out and help the paramedics. “Quite often a pilot might be stood on the side of a motorway for two or three hours while the medical staff are dealing with an incident.”

This is surely the stuff of nightmares for the Duke’s security detail. “I am sure it will have been discussed at great length,” says James.

Even so, it is hard to begrudge the Duke a few more years of relative normality. As the Queen shows few signs of ill health, his father continues to serve his six-decade long apprenticeship. Two years of country life will only postpone his vocation, of course, but it will buy him time to concentrate on his family – and perhaps add to it – and enjoy the company of trusted friends. It may be as close to normality as he will ever get.

“He doesn’t want to be useful just because he is a prince,” says Junor. “If he is rescuing someone, there is no formality or protocol involved. In that situation, he can be what he wants to be – just a man doing a job.”